Here We Go!

What I’ve been working on for the last few months has just gone up here – an enterprise deployment suite for Mozilla Firefox.

We’ve got a few big things on the go – the first, a service called Torch, is a customization tool that lets you configure Firefox with a few clicks, including:

Default homepage and bookmarks

Web proxy settings

Preloaded certificates

Bundled addons

Localization

… and a bunch of other things. It also lets you pick which prefs you want to lock down, and generates both .EXE and .MSI installers that you can deploy through SMS or SCCM. On top of that, to complement Firefox’s fantastic cross-platform, cross-device sync services, we are also offering hosted sync services in a CICA5970 and SAS70-compliant hosting environment; enterprise users can walk away from their desktops and take all their bookmarks, history and open tabs with them on their iPhones, iPads, Android devices and, soon, Blackberries and Playbooks.

And if your company wants to keep everything in-house, we’re also offering rackable appliances hosting both services, Torch and Sync, that we’ll tailor to the particular needs and scale of your environment.

Firefox 4 is a fantastic product with some great features for enterprise users – it runs just fine on Windows XP, lives happily alongside Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and gives you a fast, secure browser without forcing organizations to upgrade their hardware, browser or operating system just to take advantage of modern web tools and development.

I’ll have more to say about this soon, but we’ve got a pretty great product on offer here; if your organization looking for a sane, manageable path out from under IE6 or 7 that doesn’t force you to upgrade everything else you own all at once, you should take a look at Bespoke I/O or send us an email.